Projects:2015s1-31 Cracking the Voynich manuscript code

Introduction

The Voynich Manuscript is a document written in an unknown script that has been carbon dated back to the early 15th century [1] and believed to be created within Europe [2]. Named after Wilfrid Voynich, whom purchased the folio in 1912, the manuscript has become a well-known mystery within linguistics and cryptology. It is divided into several different section based on the nature of the drawings [3]. These sections are:

• Herbal
• Astronomical
• Biological
• Cosmological
• Pharmaceutical
• Recipes

The folio numbers and examples of each section are outlined in appendix section A.2. In general, the Voynich Manuscript has fallen into three particular hypotheses [4]. These are as follows:

• Cipher Text: The text is encrypted.
• Plain Text: The text is in a plain, natural language that is currently unidentified.
• Hoax: The text has no meaningful information.

Note that the manuscript may fall into more than one of these hypotheses [4]. It may be that the manuscript is written through steganography, the concealing of the true meaning within the possibly meaningless text.

Team

Supervisors

• Prof. Derek Abbott
• Dr. Brian Ng
• Maryam Ebrahimpour

Honours Students

• Andrew McInnes
• Lifei Wang

Resources

• Standard University Computers
  • MATLAB Computing Environment
  • C++ Programming Language
  • BASH Scripts
• Electronic Voynich Transcriptions
• Universal Declaration of Human Rights in various languages
• Various electronic English texts

Further Project Information

• Cracking the Voynich Code 2015